Queen Elizabeth and the "Merry Wives" [pp. 348-358]

1887.] (QUEEN ELIZABETH AND "THE MERRY WIVES." 357
The strongest internal evidence that the play was thus written to order is, I think, the fact that in no other Shaksperean
play is there such an entire absence of action, speech, or allusion, introductive of the characters presented, as distinguishes
this comedy of The Merry Wives. The audience is supposed
at the outset to be perfectly familiar with them. Dame Quickly
is imported from Eastcheap and made the mother of a rather
backward schoolboys-in the French doctor's service, to be sure,
but still for the purpose of ministering to Falstaff's uses. Shallow, a justice from the interior, who had witnessed Falstaff's
disgrace in the parade at Westminster, turns up again; the
precious Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol still follow the fat knight's
impecunious fortunes, but now to assist in his final and permanent humiliation at the hands of individuals of a class he has so
often maligned and lampooned, and to abandon him cavalierly,
like everybody else, at the end. It mattered very little to Shakspere whether the scenes in Falstaft's career depicted in the
comedy came before or after the Henry IV. or the Henry V.
However aesthetic commentators may discuss this tremendous
question, we may be sure it troubled him not the least.
And, the queen's mandate once satisfied, I think we have evidences enough that the play, under Shakspere's control, soon grew
beyond the limited purview of Elizabeth's characteristic. It soon
began to have something more in it than the horse-play between
Falstaff and the Merry Wives. How much more we may never exactly know. Since its present text is from the First Folio, it shared
the fate of everything touched by the monumental carelessness
of the editors of that volume. But even as we have it, the play
is a local chronicle, best preservative, among the whole gallery,
of English local life, manners, and domestic conditions. Unlike
any other of the comedies, its robust action and high color are
English, not French, Spanish, Italian, or classical. And to its
enrichment Shakspere steadily turned the resources he found so
copiously about him. In the course of twenty-one years this
rapid sketch made at the queen's command became the complete
comedy of I623, packed full of allusion to petty tradesmen, to
the popular song-books and riddle-books of the day, to the discovery of Guinea; the introduction of hackney coaches; the
trivial legislation of the Parliament of I6o5-I6o6; to the performances at Paris Gardens; the wholesale knighting of retainers by
James I.; to dozens of other purely local incidents occurring at
intervals of from one to three years. To suppose all these allusions inserted in a lump at the end of twenty-one years is quite as